Month: July 2011

Turtle Pants!

I’ve been trying on and off for the last year or so to find or come up with a great cotton PJ pants pattern with an elastic waist and that works with our cloth diapers. (The kiddo is nearly two and we’re still going strong on that front – works for us, but pants are getting more challenging.) There have been many attempts, and all of them so far have met with failure. For the patterns, either the fit was off, the finishing was crummy, or the instructions were baffling. I’ve also tried making my own patterns by tracing his current clothes but the Christening outfit was the only one that really came out well.

We were at the fabric store (it’s next to the CSA pickup spot, and they hand out balloons!!) a few weeks ago and I noticed this book just as Henry was starting to hit his limit. Looked nice, though, based on my 7-second flip-through (the illustrations are somehow reminiscent of the Anne of Green Gables homemaker book that I loved in 5th grade), so it was essentially an impulse buy.

But WOW! The PJ pants pattern is pretty much awesome.

Such simple sewing (which is great given the amount of time I will be dedicating to the project), and although they’re big, they work. I feel like the much loved elephant pants are a size down (a solid 2T) whereas these are 3T and still biggish. Luckily they roll well (and hold the crease – yay double layer of cotton).

One last photo of the 23 month old kiddo, his “big truck!” book, and the turtle pants.

(Sorry you can’t really see the pants in that photo and the shirt doesn’t match – he was happy to try them on, didn’t want to take them off, and REALLY didn’t want to pose for the camera, so I gave up quickly.)

There are definitely going to be more iterations of this pattern – it’s great.

More kitchen wipes

We have a set or two of flat fold cloth diapers that were originally the burp cloths and have evolved into the kitchen and kiddo cleanup cloths. After two years, it was time for newer replacements, so I thought I’d get more diapers, cut them into quarters, and use bias tape to close the seams.

I got a bias tape maker (looks kind of like a zipper pull – magical little device. Here’s the pressed coil of bias tape all ready to go.

And the first few in the stack…

And all folded and put away in the drawer.

My two quarter yards of this blue binding fabric made twenty quarter cloths. Neat! Next time, I’ll cut the diapers in half (these are on the slightly chintzy side size-wise and the turn didn’t come out that well – a straight line would look much better, be faster to fold out of the laundry AND be faster sewing).